What You Can Do to Make a Difference

• Maintain momentum through individual and collective action.
• Promote a shared system of research and scholarship.

Actions Librarians Can Take

• Educate faculty, staff, students, and university administrators on the changing structures of scholarly communication, the importance of broad accessibility of research to faculty productivity and institutional prestige, and the impact of the business practices of different journal publishers on faculty careers and institutional goals. The presentations, flyers, and other resources on this site are a good start as you begin outreach to a population that may have little background on scholarly communication or the ways it can be integrated.
• Embed the topic in other conversations and initiatives as they occur, such as cyberinfrastructure, knowledge management, electronic theses and dissertations, etc. The message will be more successful if it is part of a conversation being held by scholars, administrators, and other campus professionals.
• Launch an OAI-compliant repository for faculty e-prints and datasets on your campus, or develop services to help faculty deposit their work. To do this, you may find it helpful to attend a practicum or conference on digital repositories, or search the programs of past meetings to read up on the latest trends and download presentations. (One useful site is that of SPARC’s Digital Repositories meeting, held in November 2008, at http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/ir08/)
• Cancel journals or journal packages that are unreasonably expensive or whose terms of use are unreasonably restrictive, and issue a public statement explaining why.
• Include records for OA journals in your library catalog and/or your e-journal resolver database.
• Launch an open-access journal in collaboration with your faculty. Promote OA journals at your college or university to indexing services, potential funders, authors, and readers.
• Redirect funds from your materials budget to pay author fees for faculty who publish in Open Access journals, or to support an open-access publishing service on your campus.
• Encourage or initiate the formation of a Copyright Management Center on your campus, to advise faculty and graduate students on their rights and responsibilities.
• Integrate basic concepts of scholarly communication into information literacy programs, writing classes, theses instructions, etc. for undergraduate and graduate students.
• Collaborate with your graduate school or office of research in Responsible Conduct of Research, Preparing Future Faculty, and similar programs concerned with scholarly authorship, publication, and data management.